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05/03/2011

Maximize Promotional Value of the Impending Perl 5.14 Gold Release?

As I suspect many of you have, I've been trying to test out all the important CPAN projects I use on the lastest Perl 5.14 release candidate. And while I was doing so I was thinking, "It's really great that Perl is back on a solid release track, with minor and major versions scheduled and discussed." It leads to great press and gives enterprises at least the feeling that Perl is alive and well.

And then I got to thinking, even though its awesome that Perl core language is in such good hands, truth be told I am equally affected by the great development and advances seen in some of our more important CPAN projects such as DBIC, Moose, Catalyst, Plack. Unfortunately Perl branding is currently such that when a new version of Moose or DBIC comes out, it really doesn't get picked up by the relevent media sources in the same way that new versions of Perl do. So I started to wonder how fair would it be to the members of the Perl core hackers if the press release about Perl 5.14 going gold mentioned some key advances for some of our more important Modern Perl CPAN projects since Perl 5.12 was gold? We could even mention some other not strictly technical advancements such as the Modern Perl book (or other important book releases) stats about CPAN testers exceeding 11 million test reports, etc.

For better or worse, over the past few years I've noticed that while Perl major version releases get some press, other important projects really don't. Although I don't want to unfairly ride on the massive effort of the Perl core team to get 5.14 out the door, perhaps for the sake of advocacy and general information spreading, we should consider bundling the 5.14 announcement with a choice addition of other major accomplishments from the Perl community?